Handyman's history

When Bob Williams walked away from the white-collar world in 1991, he was trying to escape nearly 20 years of living with toxic corporate stress.

Virtually every morning, he'd wake up sick to his stomach from anxiety, the former ship repair and marine electronics manager says. And one day the pressure of meeting his spiraling productivity quotas exploded into a devastating panic attack.

Certainly, Williams wasn't the first burned-out executive who decided to pack his things, write a terse note of resignation and leave a well-paid job behind. But when he locked his office door and turned away, he literally put his future and that of his family into his own hands.

Working largely by himself, the Yorktown man has spent most of the past 17 years building on the skills of his youth, transforming himself from an unhappy paper shuffler into a talented fabricator of custom metal projects. His creations range from one-of-kind signs and lighting fixtures to decorative bar rails, restaurant installations and residential details - and they can be seen in prominent settings as far away as New York, Atlanta and Las Vegas.

Peninsula architects call him the go-to guy when it comes to providing any kind of unique metal stair railing, doorknob, threshold or other ornamental building element that they or their clients can imagine - but few other fabricators will touch.

That's why Williamsburg architect Carlton Abbott approached him about making a massive scale model of the historic English fort at Jamestown - then installing it right in the middle of the internationally known tourist site.

More than 3,000 hours later, Williams has finally delivered on a 1,650-pound, 72-square-foot replica that incorporates thousands of exhaustively rendered details. Even the miniature logs in some 30 feet of palisade wall were cut, split and sharpened by hand before being transformed into bronze.

"One day one of the architects asked me, 'Are you ever scared?' And I said, 'I'm always scared. The only way I get the kind of work I do is because I'm willing to go so far outside the envelope,' " Williams says.

"There was a time when I was so scared I wouldn't touch this kind of project. But I've learned that if I can visualize something, I can figure out a way to build it. And so far I haven't run into anything that I can't visualize."

MOVED BY METAL

Williams has been called a welder, metal worker, machinist - even an artist. But he's probably best described as a born builder.

He got his first tool box as a 6-year-old kid growing up in Roanoke. From there, he went on to fabricate a telescope, a motor scooter and a small sailboat before heading off to college.

He'd much rather have been a tool-and-die maker than a science student at Virginia Tech, he says. But the pressure to go to school was just too much.

"My teachers, the preacher, my parents - everybody! - they wouldn't have it," he recalls. "If you didn't go to college, you might as well have been nobody - and your brain would turn to mush."

Three years in the Coast Guard - most of them serving as operations officer on a buoy tender - helped satisfy some of Williams' suppressed mechanical leanings after he graduated in 1970. So did his early career in an increasingly responsible series of management positions at shipyards in Maryland and Hampton Roads.

But eventually the self-described perfectionist became so wracked by worry and self-doubt that his sleep and stomach began to suffer. His only relief, he says, came inside the sanctuary of his home workshop.

"I'd go home every evening and build something that seemed more important to me than shuffling papers," he confesses. "It was a way to find some significance in a world that didn't make much sense."

Even after becoming the mid-Atlantic manager of a national defense technology firm - and improving his office's performance from chronic loss to more than $2.2 million in annual sales - Williams struggled with his anxious, empty feelings. He still managed to plod on for nearly seven more years, however, before his pent-up stress led to a panic attack and a terrifying physical collapse.

"I was just another Baby Boomer who was sent off to college, went into the military and then had his whole future mapped out for him - in management," he says. "But it wasn't who I was or what I wanted to be."

TAKING A LEAP

Williams' transformation might have been impossible without the support of his wife, Donna, who went back to work to prop up the family's greatly reduced income. She also helped him weather a string of rejections from metal fabrication firms when he started to look for work.

"They'd say, 'You're a college guy. You're a white-collar guy. You need to go back and find yourself a white-hat job,' " he recalls. "But eventually I found a place that gave me a chance, and - when they found out I wasn't blowing smoke - I ended up doing all of their custom decorative work."

Still, Williams and his wife faced a financial roller-coaster as he honed his skills and established a reputation. Even during their worst moments, however, they never experienced the crippling kind of worry and anxiety that had caused him so much trouble before.

"Sometimes it was good. Sometimes it wasn't so good - and sometimes it just wasn't there at all," she says. "We just took it one day at a time, plodding along, hoping that something good would come out of it - that people would recognize his talent."

Among the first to exploit those abilities was Abbott and his Williamsburg firm, which needed help solving an unusually difficult problem at the new Colonial Williamsburg visitor center.

Asked to mount a series of 1,500-pound granite plaques on a curved wall, Williams designed an ingenious hanging system that not only led to a secure, level, plumb and precise alignment but also a remarkably quick and easy installation.

"He's a superb craftsman - and one who fills this really unusual niche," Abbott says. "He soaks up all the details of what you want, applies his knowledge and then finds ways to make it happen. That's one thing you can bet on with Bob. He will find a way to get it done - and get it done right."

That resourcefulness explains why Williams got the call when Abbott and APVA Preservation Virginia needed help getting estimates for a bronze model that would show visitors what historic James Fort looked like in the early 1600s. It also tells you why - after the numbers from several foundries broke the $100,000 project's back - Williams lept at the chance to make it happen himself.

"I begged for this job - and not because I needed it for the money. I wanted to make this fort," he says. "And I wanted to do it in a way that would make people stop in their tracks and say - 'Hey! That looks just like the real fort.' "

MAN ON A MISSION

Williams began his endeavor with dozens and dozens of drawings and photographs showing what Historic Jamestowne archaeologists believe the site looked like from 1607 to 1611. Then he methodically scaled each image - including cannon and decking boards as well as structures and palisade walls - to the 1/4-inch size needed to create a panoramic, intensely detailed replica.

Those plans led to dozens of preliminary models that Williams carved, machined or sculpted from a dizzying array of materials, including shrubbery twigs as well as metal, wax, clay and plastic. These models, in turn, were used to create an army of polyurethane rubber molds, each one capturing Williams' meticulous vision with painstaking precision.

Even Williams was surprised, however, when he began the next series of steps at the College of William and Mary's Fine Arts Department foundry. Trading studio time and guidance from sculpture professor Elizabeth Mead for the cost of his fuel and materials - plus giving her students some hands-on experience - the fabricator faced endless hours of work as he plodded through a labor-intensive process.

"It was a shocker," he says, describing all the shoveling, grinding and sifting needed to prepare nearly 18 tons of plaster and sand for the shells that encased his wax molds. "Anybody who thinks it's just a few steps is really off the mark. This is a down and dirty job."

With Mead's help, Williams became increasingly expert over the course of nearly a dozen pours, developing several innovations that the veteran sculptor has since adopted. But the epic task of pouring nearly a ton of molten bronze only led to months of additional work at his home workbench, where he carefully finished hundreds of rough-cast pieces.

"Every night, I'd see him sitting out in his shop, hunched on his stool under a bright light - his magnifier in front of his eyes - filing and filing away," his wife says. "He had a vision - and he knew he could do it right. But he had no idea it would take this long."

Nearly 21 months passed between the project's start and the installation on the last day of September. But though the final assembly and waxing seemed to take forever, too, the unruffled Williams never rushed.

"He's going to have to pitch a tent next to it now that he's through - so he can sleep with it," Abbott says. "He loves it that much."

Williams jokes about his "post-partum depression," too, comparing the completion of his long, long task to having a baby. But already he and Abbott are looking ahead at even more challenging projects.

"Was it worth it all? Probably not in terms of my pocketbook. But I wouldn't have traded it for anything in the world," Williams says. "This bronze will be here forever."